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Stanislaw Lem (12 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy and satire. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon said that Lem was the most widely read science fiction writer in the world. In 1996, Lem was the recipient of the prestigious Polish national award, the Order of the White Eagle.
His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humanity's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. Translations of his works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns. Multiple translated versions of his works exist.
Lem was born in 1921 in Lwów, Poland (now Ukraine). He was the son of Sabina Woller (1892–1979) and Samuel Lem (1879–1954), a wealthy laryngologist and former physician in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Though raised a Roman Catholic, he later became an atheist "for moral reasons ... the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created ... intentionally". After the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland, he was not allowed to study at the Polytechnic as he wished because of his "bourgeois origin" and only due to his father's connections was accepted to study medicine at Lwów University in 1940. During World War II and the Nazi occupation (1941–1944), Lem survived with false papers, earning a living as a car mechanic and welder, and becoming active in the resistance.
"During that period, I learned in a very personal, practical way that I was no “Aryan”. I knew that my ancestors were Jews, but I knew nothing of the Mosaic faith and, regrettably, nothing at all of Jewish culture. So it was, strictly speaking, only the Nazi legislation that brought home to me the realization that I had Jewish blood in my veins. We succeeded in evading imprisonment in the ghetto, however. With false papers, my parents and I survived that ordeal." (Stanislaw Lem, "Chance and Order", The New Yorker 59 / 30 January 1984, page 88-98)
In 1945, Polish eastern Kresy was annexed into Soviet Ukraine and the family, like many other Poles, was resettled to Kraków where Lem, at his father's insistence, took up medical studies at the Jagiellonian University. He refused to tailor his answers to the prevailing Lysenkoism and failed his final examinations on purpose so as not to be obliged to become a military doctor. Earlier he had started working as a research assistant in a scientific institution and writing stories in his spare time.
Lem made his literary debut in 1946 as a poet, and at that time he also published several dime novels. Beginning that year, Lem's first science fiction novel The Man from Mars was serialized in the magazine Nowy Swiat Przygód (New World of Adventures). Between 1947 and 1950 Lem, while continuing his work as a scientific research assistant, published poems, short stories, and scientific essays. However, during the era of Stalinism, all published works had to be directly approved by the communist regime. Lem finished a partly autobiographical novella Hospital of the Transfiguration (Szpital Przemienienia) in 1948, but it was suppressed by the authorities until 1955 when he added a sequel more acceptable to the doctrine of socialist realism. In 1951 he published his first book, Astronauci (The Astronauts); it was commissioned as juvenile SF and Lem was forced to include many references to the 'glorious future of communism' in it. He later criticized this novel (as well as several of his other early pieces, bowing to the ideological pressure) as simplistic; nonetheless its publication persuaded him to become a full-time writer.
Lem became truly productive after 1956, when the de-Stalinization period in the Soviet Union led to the "Polish October", when Poland experienced an increase in freedom of speech. Between 1956 and 1968, Lem authored 17 books. His works were widely translated abroad (although mostly in the Eastern Bloc countries). In 1957 he published his first non-fiction, philosophical book, Dialogi (Dialogues). Dialogi and Summa Technologiae (1964) are his two most famous philosophical texts. The Summa is notable for being a unique analysis of prospective social, cybernetic, and biological advances. In this work, Lem discusses philosophical implications of technologies that were completely in the realm of science fiction then, but are gaining importance today—for instance, virtual reality and nanotechnology. Over the next few decades, he published many books, both science fiction and philosophical/futurological, although from the 1980s onwards he tended to concentrate on philosophical texts and essays.
He gained international fame for The Cyberiad, a series of humorous short stories from a mechanical universe inhabited by robots (who had occasional contacts with biological "slimies" and human "palefaces" ), first published in English in 1974. His best-known novels include Solaris (1961), His Master's Voice (Glos pana, 1968), and the late Fiasco (Fiasko, 1987), expressing most strongly his major theme of the futility of humanity's attempts to comprehend the truly alien. Solaris was made into a film in 1972 by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and won a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1972; in 2002, Steven Soderbergh directed a Hollywood remake starring George Clooney.
In 1982, with martial law in Poland declared, Lem moved to West Berlin where he became a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). After that, he settled in Vienna. He returned to Poland in 1988.
In the early 1990s Lem met with a literary scholar and critic, Peter Swirski, for a series of extensive interviews, published together with other critical materials and translations as A Stanislaw Lem Reader (1997). In the book Lem speaks about a range of issues rarely before touched on in any interview. Moreover, the book includes Swirski's translation of Lem's retrospective essay, 'Thirty Years Later', devoted to Lem's legendary nonfictional treatise, Summa Technologiae. During later interviews in 2005, Lem expressed his disappointment with the genre of science fiction and his general pessimism regarding technical progress. He viewed the human body as unsuitable for space travel, held that information technology drowns people in a glut of low-quality information, and considered truly intelligent robots as both undesirable and impossible to construct.
Lem died in Kraków on 27 March 2006 at the age of 84 due to heart disease.
About author and audiobooks:
Code:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem |
Books
Stanislaw Lem - Solaris: The Definitive Edition (read by Alessandro Juliani)
Stanislaw Lem - The Cyberiad (read by Scott Aiello)
Stanislaw Lem - The Star Diaries (read by Unknown reader)
Stanislaw Lem - Memoirs Found In A Bathtub (read by Jeff Woodman)
Stanislaw Lem - Fiasco (read by Oliver Wyman)
Code:
http://rapidgator.net/file/8c30fb9aa39733fb9c82c94889466203/Solaris.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/f48cb5c70d8ef6e56d56e746e68d6512/The_Cyberiad.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/f3f95b136e42cb6feb47c50f143d9e43/The_Star_Diaries.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/3de13e3a5eacac252d15e967ebb7eab0/Memoirs_Found_In_A_Bathtub.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/341492f7bf931de124d9f2d3a528c95d/Fiasco.rar.html |
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